On Sat, 7 Dec 1996, Larry Masinter wrote:
> Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 10:43:10 PST
> From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
> To: kweide@tezcat.com
> Cc: www-international@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Accept-Charset support
> Resent-Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 13:46:01 -0500
> Resent-From: www-international@w3.org
>
> # If there is a need for a client to express "I can understand UTF-8,
> # but can only display some of the 10646 characters: ..." - and I
> # definitely think there is such a need - I don not see a way to implement
> # this cleanly.
>
> I think this kind of communication is along the same lines as: "I can
> implement all of HTML 3.5 tables, except I don't know anything about
> the 'border' parameter".
>
> That is, there may be a need to communicate special subset
> capabilities, but usually those limitations are transient and too
> fine-grained to actually matter in real communication.
>
> In general, in the web, we've avoided catering to fine-grained
> differentiation of client capabilities. Yes, you can say "I speak
> postscript" or not, but there's no good way to say "I can take
> postscript files but don't give me any that won't look good on little
> pieces of paper".
>
> There _is_ a proposal for allowing profiles of capabilities to be
> expressed and negotiated, and the proposal is elaborated in internet
> drafts:
> draft-holtman-http-negotiation-04.txt
> draft-ietf-http-feature-reg-00.txt
> and related topics in:
> draft-mutz-http-attributes-02.txt
> draft-goland-http-headers-00.txt
> from your nearby internet drafts directory. Perhaps 'support for
> particular subsets of ISO-10646' might fit into this category.
>
> Larry
>
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